Tuesday, January 26, 2016

[Permaculture Principles] 78 year old Juan Anton Mora runs 40 minutes several times a week.
What is his secret? A healthy lifestyle and a wish to change the world
must have played their part. Because the purpose of each of his actions
is to “change the world”, or to be more precise, to fight hunger in the
world. No less.
30 years ago, Juan bought a small plot planted with orange trees in
Alzira, Valencia in Spain. He followed advice given by the conventional
styled gardener who was taking care of the field at that time… who
proposed a weedkiller that would kill the grass for 8 years. Juan Anton
decided to stop using chemicals and the gardener decided to quit. A few
months after, the grass grew back, the trees starve. It’s a disaster.
“I started to study Mother Earth’s working, I’ve been to ecological
classes and a permaculture class. I bought some Fukuoka’s books. Then I
started to apply what I learned.” He started to put cut grass at the
trees base, so it turns into compost. It has taken a few month for the
trees to grow again, after the microorganisms killed by chemicals came
back and life returned to the soil.
Juan planted new trees: bananas, walnuts, almonds, figs, olives, peaches
and many others. He created his edible forest guided by permaculture
principles. Its goal is to have the best productivity with the minimum
of work. Today, the bulk of the work is to recover production.
Juan Anton’s forest proves it: the trees are healthy and the fruits
are delicious. Some simple principles explain this success, for instance
about orange trees diseases: “These orange trees are healthy only
because the ground is healthy. Chemicals fertilizer make the sap sweet,
which increase the risk of disease.”
Today, Juan is looking to find an easy way to produce vegetables all
year long. He builds homemade greenhouses with local materials, like
bamboo, old fridge, picked up branches. The wall inside the main
greenhouse was built with stones from the surrounding forest. He uses it
to catch the warmth during the day and give it back during the night so
the plants won’t freeze during winter. Read More

[Wired] One of the interesting
aspects of the 2016 winter storm from Jonas is the snow. Yes, there is
lots of snow—but what do you do with all of it? If it wasn’t too much,
you could just plow the streets and leave the extra snow on the side.
With a bit more snow, you have to scoop it up on the side and ship it
out to snow farms—yes, there is such a thing. A snow farm is a place where they just pile up extra snow (and it can take a long time to melt—last year’s snow in Boston didn’t melt until the summer).
But sometimes, a snow farm isn’t good enough. When you need snow removed right now, you need a snow melter.
Again, yes—these things actually exist. It’s basically a big machine
that you dump snow into and it melts the snow so you can pour it down
the storm drain where it hopefully doesn’t freeze.
I’ll be honest. I don’t know much about snow melters. In fact, before
this storm I didn’t even know they existed. However, I do know something about estimations. So, let’s get right to it.
As usual, I will start with some assumptions.

When it snows, people usually measure it in inches of accumulation
(at least in the USA). But what really matters is the mass, which
depends on the density. The density of snow can change a lot. Wet snow
has a high density; dry snow is low. I remember hearing that 1 inch of
rain would be like 10 inches of snow—so I will use that to get the mass
of snow.

You don’t need to remove all the snow—just the stuff on the streets.
So, what percent of surface area for a city is covered by streets?
Based on my rough estimations from Google Maps, a random block in
Washington DC is about 10 percent street. Really, before looking at a
map I was going to say 2 percent of the land is a street. Let’s just go
with 10 percent.

You might think that snow is frozen at 32°F (0°C), but really it
could be colder. For this calculation, I am just going to assume the
snow is at the freezing point. Also, what temperature do you want to
bring the melt water up to? Just a ballpark figure of 40°F is what I
will use.

Now let’s say that it’s snowing fast. Maybe 1 inch of snow an hour.
If I want to melt the snow on the roads as it falls, what kind of power
consumption would I need? Let’s start with a 1 square meter of ground.
In one hour, 1 inch of snow would be a depth of 0.0254 meters. So the
total snow on this square would be 0.0254 m3.
If only one tenth of this snow is water, that would just be 0.00254 m3 of frozen water. Also, I only want to melt 10 percent of this, so now I am down to a volume of ice/snow of 2.54 x 10-4 m3. Assuming an ice density of about 1,000 kg/m3 this makes 0.254 kg of ice per square meter that needs to be melted. Read More

The severe weather is part of a big chill that has rolled through East Asia

[Time] Heavy snowfall in Japan has caused eight deaths and injured
more than 610 people since extreme weather began buffeting the country
this weekend.
A winter pressure pattern unleashed record levels of snowfall and paralyzed transportation systems, according to Japan’s Mainichi
newspaper. All Nippon Airways and Japan Airlines both canceled flights;
110 passengers were stranded on a bullet train on Monday; and one
weather agency warned of avalanches and icy roads.
Some areas of western Japan were blanketed by about 20 in.
of snow. Even islands further south felt the cold. Okinawa witnessed its
second recorded snowfall in history on Sunday. Read More

[Scientific American] Floodwaters that washed icy brine into streets and homes along the eastern seaboard during Saturday’s blizzard
reached heights in some places not experienced since Hurricane Sandy.
“I just hope it isn’t a sign of things to come,” Pam Bross told a local newspaper as she mopped up the market she operates on a New Jersey street not normally reached by storm surges.
With tides and storm surges inching upward and inward, worsening floods are harbingers of even soggier times ahead. As the weekend’s winter storm hurtles across the Atlantic Ocean, bringing its flood risks to
Europe, new research is pointing to an outsized role that ocean warming
has been playing in raising sea levels — a problem normally associated
with melting land ice.
Water expands as it heats up, and oceans have been absorbing most of
the heat trapped by greenhouse gases released by fossil fuel burning,
deforestation and animal farming. A new study blames expansion of
warming waters for as much sea level rise from 2002 through 2014 as the
melting of all the glaciers and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets
combined.
“Satellite observations show that sea level rise over the last decade
is explained, by about 50 percent, by thermal expansion,” said Roelof Rietbroek of the University of Bonn, who led the research, which was published Monday in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The team of scientists led by Rietbroek concluded that thermal
expansion caused seas to rise globally during the 12 years studied by
about two-thirds of an inch, with ice melt and other factors
contributing to an overall rise of twice that amount.
“We were surprised to find such high rates for the thermosteric
contribution,” Rietbroek said. “Previous studies from hydrographic data
indicated smaller signals, mostly confined in the upper ocean.” Read More

[ABC News] As military helicopters ferry search and rescue teams over the Pacific
Northwest, below them are scenes of devastation from a giant earthquake
that could strike the region at any time.

Tsunami waters surge through coastal communities. Buildings, bridges and
roads lie in ruins. Fires burn out of control. Survivors are stranded
on rooftops, cling to floating debris or are trapped inside wrecked
buildings.

Seismologists say a full rupture of a 650-mile-long offshore fault running from Northern California
to British Columbia and an ensuing tsunami could come in our lifetime,
and emergency management officials are busy preparing for the worst.

Federal, state and military officials have been working together to draft plans to be followed when the "Big One" happens.

These contingency plans reflect deep anxiety about the potential gravity
of the looming disaster: upward of 14,000 people dead in the worst-case
scenarios, 30,000 injured, thousands left homeless and the region's
economy setback for years, if not decades.

As a response, what planners envision is a deployment of civilian and
military personnel and equipment that would eclipse the response to any
natural disaster that has occurred thus far in the U.S.

There would be waves of cargo planes, helicopters and ships, as well as
tens of thousands of soldiers, emergency officials, mortuary teams,
police officers, firefighters, engineers, medical personnel and other
specialists.

"The response will be orders of magnitude larger than Hurricane Katrina
or Super Storm Sandy," said Lt. Col. Clayton Braun of the Washington
State Army National Guard, referring to two of the best-known natural
disasters in recent U.S. history.

Since 2013, Braun has led a team at work on putting together a military
response plan for Washington state, to be used in conjunction with
efforts by state and federal civilian agencies.

Oregon's response plan is called the Cascadia Playbook, named after the
threatening offshore fault — the Cascadia Subduction Zone. The plan,
unveiled last year, has been handed out to key officials so the state
can respond quickly when disaster strikes.

"That playbook is never more than 100 feet from where I am," said Andrew Phelps, director of the Oregon Office of Emergency Management. When Phelps goes out to dinner, he keeps the playbook in his car for quick access.

A magnitude 9.0 earthquake and tsunami that devastated parts of Japan in
2011 gave greater clarity to what the Pacific Northwest needs to do to
improve its readiness for a similar catastrophe. Read More

[IB Times] It’s official. 2015 was the planet’s hottest year on
historical records dating back to 1880, shattering the previous mark set
in 2014 by 0.13 Celsius (0.23 degrees Fahrenheit), scientists at NASA
and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) confirmed
Wednesday.
The latest data provides further evidence that most of the
warming due to climate change — driven largely by human-made greenhouse
gas emissions — has occurred in the past 35 years, with 15 of the 16
warmest years on record occurring since 2001. However, last year was the
first time the global average temperature was 1 degree Celsius (1.8
degrees Fahrenheit) or more above the pre-industrial average, NASA said,
in a statement released Wednesday.
This means that the planet is already halfway toward the
internationally-accepted redline of a 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit rise in
average global surface temperatures above the pre-industrial levels.
“The reason why this is such a warm record year is because of the
long-term warming trend, and there is no evidence that that warming
trend has slowed, paused, or hiatused at any point in the last few
decades,” Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space
Studies, reportedly said, referring to the widely-refuted idea of a
so-called global warming hiatus between 1998 and 2013.
When temperatures are averaged at a global scale, the differences
between years are measured in fractions of a degree. According to the NOAA,
2015 was 0.29 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than 2014 — the largest yearly
jump ever. NASA, which used the same raw temperature data, but different
methods to analyze Earth’s polar regions and global temperatures,
calculated a slightly smaller figure of 0.23 degrees Fahrenheit — the
largest yearly jump since 1998.
“2015 was remarkable even in the context of the ongoing El Nino,”
Schmidt said, in the statement. “Last year’s temperatures had an assist
from El Nino, but it is the cumulative effect of the long-term trend
that has resulted in the record warming that we are seeing.”
The El Nino weather pattern is a natural cycle of warming in the
Pacific Ocean that heats up the ocean surface in the region every two to
seven years and has a wide-ranging impact on global temperatures. Given
that the strong El Nino, which contributed toward making 2015 a year of
extremes — from floods in the U.K. to record-breaking temperatures over
the Christmas holiday in the U.S. — has continued into 2016, this year
could set another global temperature record, with anthropogenic climate
change spurring the vast majority of global warming and El Nino putting
“the icing on the cake.”
“In December and recent months in the autumn, records were broken by a
substantial margin - much stronger than what we had seen earlier in the
year. And it's going to be very difficult for that not to continue into
at least the first part of next year because, in particular, the ocean
temperatures are so warm,” Thomas Karl, director of the NOAA’s National
Centers for Environmental Information, told the BBC. Read More

[Tech Times] The Indian Ocean is an ecological desert in the works,
warned scientists who sounded the alarm not just on overfishing but also
on the pernicious effects of global warming.
Overfishing is not the sole cause for the lowered catch in
the region – food sources for fish are increasingly becoming scarce
because of global warming.
Warming in the Indian Ocean has been decreasing phytoplankton by up to 20 percent, revealed Roxy
Mathew Koll, a scientist working at the Indian Institute of Tropical
Meteorology. Along with other scientists, Koll put out related research
in December.
Rising water temperatures appear to have been decreasing the
number of phytoplankton – microscopic plants located at the base of the
marine food chain serve as food for fish – for more than six decades
now.
This scarcity of phytoplankton is feared to affect the whole food
chain and likely turn the Indian Ocean into an “ecological desert,”
according to Koll.
This situation will hound food security not just in the region but
also international fish markets that get their supply from such
countries.
Fifty-four-year-old Anslem Silva, for instance, has been fishing for
40 years from a harbor on the west coast of Sri Lanka. However, for
about five years now, it has been tough for him to fill his boat.
“Where there were fish for decades, now there is very little. It is strange, but all of us have been noticing that.”
Waters in sections of the Indian Ocean have warmed over the past
century by 1.2 degrees Celsius or 34.16 degrees Fahrenheit, leading to a
slower integration of surface water and nutrient-dense deeper waters.
This has barred nutrients from getting to plankton, which mostly find
themselves in surface waters. Read More

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About LORI TOYE

Author and mystic Lori Toye has written fourteen books dealing with geographic changes in the Earth and how we can respond to these changes to create peace and harmony and advance our own spiritual growth and self-development. Topics include "Building the Seamless Garment - Revealing the Secret Teachings of Ascension and the Golden Cities," a book filled with lessons that focus on the hidden teachings of Ascension - the spiritual and mental process and the spiritual techniques that can free us from the confines of the need to reincarnate. Toye also created the first Earth Changes Map in 1989 delineating future changes to the Earth's geography, as well as the I AM America Atlas, a full color atlas of the I AM America Maps, featuring many new maps and prophecies. Originally published more than 20 years ago before public awareness of the serious environmental issues of Global Warming and Climate Change, Lori has been featured on NBC, FOX, UPN, London's Carlton Television, the Washington Post, and the New York Times.